By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

This book describes a grammar (mainly morphology and syntax) of theLewoingu dialect of Lamaholot, an Austronesian language(Central-Malayo-Polynesian subgroup) spoken by 150,000 ~ 200,000 people onthe eastern tip of Flores and the surrounding area in eastern Indonesia.Lamaholot has 35 dialects, and although there are some descriptions anddictionaries for other dialects, the Lewoingu dialect has never beendescribed before. The description in this book is basically theory-neutral,and analyses are kept to a minimum. This work will be of interest todescriptive linguists and Austronesian specialists, in particular becauselanguages of eastern Indonesia in general are poorly documented andrelations of several dialects of Lamaholot are poorly understood.Typologists and theoretical linguists would be interested in uniqueagreement in Lamaholot, where agreement emerges not only on verbs andadjectives, but also on adverbs, numerals, a preposition, and even on theconjunction ('and'). Theoreticians will also be interested in the chapteron resumptive pronouns, which is a rare description of the phenomena inAustronesian languages and shows that Lamaholot basically shares generalproperties of resumptive pronouns found in Irish and Semitic languages.Also of interest are possessive constructions, where the possessor can beeither pronominal or postnominal, and each other has peculiar constraints.